In 18 months the GOP will run on a "we cut the deficit while Obama spent money on X" and they will win their seats becauseA) Most people have incredibly short memories.B) Most people don't ever dig below the surface of a talking pointC) By then they will need maybe 38% of the vote to retain 60% of the House.

You pass a bill that says "You have ZERO flexibility in what you can cut - it must be x% across the board" then biatch and complain that the cuts should come from "somewhere else". The stupid, it burns!

All they will do is say we didn't want to close your airport Obama did that. We want to cut waste. The people in their districts will believe that Obama gets to chose what gets cut and still vote for them.

Spaced Lion:Holy shiat, reading that article hurt my brain. I can only think of one response. Take it away, George.

[i815.photobucket.com image 320x180]

This.

You guys wrote and passed the sequester. It demanded flat, unrestricted, across the board cuts up to a certain percent. Thats it. Thats why people with functioning brains were screaming at you to fix the damn thing before it was enacted. It demanded flat, across the board cuts without regard to programs. There was no freedom built into the damn thing to pick and choose where to cut becuase the point of it was to be so painful if it were enacted that you idiots would avoid it at all costs. Yet here we are. Thank you belatedly for finally coming around to see that flat rate cuts are ridiculously stupid. We can now enter in your yearly evaluation "He finally realized he was a dumbass, it was too late to effect anything, but hey its something."

So, biatch about your towers being closed, safety concerns, etc. Those are all legitimate concerns. But you were informed that these were in fact the consequences 2+ months ago. You reap what you sow, and you morons planted the seeds for the weeds you are biatching about 2 years ago,then ensured they came to fruition in February. Just WTF did you think would happen?

/Idiots, morons, dumbasses and spoiled children. Its like the child that was told wouldn't get dessert if he didn't eat his vegetables, not eating his vegetables...and then biatching about not getting dessert.

WIcked Chinchilla:You guys wrote and passed the sequester. It demanded flat, unrestricted, across the board cuts up to a certain percent. Thats it.

You do realize that by "you guys," you mean "the Obama White House, which thought it up, and and both parties in Congress, which passed it because it was a compromise offered by Obama," right?

In reality, the sequester "cuts" aren't really cuts as a normal person would understand it - it's reductions in the increase in spending. Yeah, that's right: it's still an increase, just not as much as some people want. It's proportionally equivalent to a middle-class worker having to eat sandwiches at home one night a month instead of eating out at a cheap restaurant.

We should let the claimed "sequester cuts" stand as claimed. Every Federal bureaucrat who is saying "we're cutting this program because of the sequester" should be forced to live with those cuts.

It would probably end up as an actual decrease in spending, and the bureaucrats responsible for the crazy claims would have to deal with actual decreases in budgets instead of a smaller increase than they assumed they'd get.

Fizpez:You pass a bill that says "You have ZERO flexibility in what you can cut - it must be x% across the board" then biatch and complain that the cuts should come from "somewhere else". The stupid, it burns!

"Thanks to 0bama, Hicksville Regional Airport was closed, costing the local economy over a dozen jobs and millions of dollars in vital civil aviation subsidies. Meanwhile, the 0bama Administration has continued to fund the abortion industry to the tune of eleventy billion dollars. My friends, you elected me to fight exactly this sort of Big Government waste, fraud, and abuse. And while I and my Republican colleagues were unable to stop it last time, I pledge that I will continue to take the fight to the Beltway bandits who did this to you. My opponent, on the other hand, is a tax-and-spend liberal who will only make it worse."

Parthenogenetic:Fizpez: You pass a bill that says "You have ZERO flexibility in what you can cut - it must be x% across the board" then biatch and complain that the cuts should come from "somewhere else". The stupid, it burns!

"Thanks to 0bama, Hicksville Regional Airport was closed, costing the local economy over a dozen jobs and millions of dollars in vital civil aviation subsidies. Meanwhile, the 0bama Administration has continued to fund the abortion industry to the tune of eleventy billion dollars. My friends, you elected me to fight exactly this sort of Big Government waste, fraud, and abuse. And while I and my Republican colleagues were unable to stop it last time, I pledge that I will continue to take the fight to the Beltway bandits who did this to you. My opponent, on the other hand, is a tax-and-spend liberal who will only make it worse."

"The sequester was passed by both chambers of Congress, including the Republican led House as a poison pill that would force both parties to negotiate in good faith to avoid what were almost universally understood to be "across the board cuts". In the months leading up to the enacting of the sequester option public media nightly informed us of the unpalatable cuts which would be enacted as part of sequestration. MY opponent is either negligent to the point of "deriliction of duty" by NOT knowing what the sequestration bill meant or counting on you, the public, to be willing to swallow whatever lies he decided to tell once this bill was put into action. The Republican House chose to "call our bluff" on the sequestration bill by not allowing even modest compromises between budget cuts and additional revenue measures - as you can see the bill was no bluff, we are living with those choices."

Fizpez:Parthenogenetic: Fizpez: You pass a bill that says "You have ZERO flexibility in what you can cut - it must be x% across the board" then biatch and complain that the cuts should come from "somewhere else". The stupid, it burns!

"Thanks to 0bama, Hicksville Regional Airport was closed, costing the local economy over a dozen jobs and millions of dollars in vital civil aviation subsidies. Meanwhile, the 0bama Administration has continued to fund the abortion industry to the tune of eleventy billion dollars. My friends, you elected me to fight exactly this sort of Big Government waste, fraud, and abuse. And while I and my Republican colleagues were unable to stop it last time, I pledge that I will continue to take the fight to the Beltway bandits who did this to you. My opponent, on the other hand, is a tax-and-spend liberal who will only make it worse."

"The sequester was passed by both chambers of Congress, including the Republican led House as a poison pill that would force both parties to negotiate in good faith to avoid what were almost universally understood to be "across the board cuts". In the months leading up to the enacting of the sequester option public media nightly informed us of the unpalatable cuts which would be enacted as part of sequestration. MY opponent is either negligent to the point of "deriliction of duty" by NOT knowing what the sequestration bill meant or counting on you, the public, to be willing to swallow whatever lies he decided to tell once this bill was put into action. The Republican House chose to "call our bluff" on the sequestration bill by not allowing even modest compromises between budget cuts and additional revenue measures - as you can see the bill was no bluff, we are living with those choices."

"My opponent sure has a lot of fancy words. 'Sequestration'. That means taking money away from our community and reducing our local air traffic control safety. 'Additional revenue'. That means raising taxes on hard-working American families and small businesses who are Taxed Enough Already™. And did you notice that he admitted that the Democrats are in cahoots with what he called the 'public media' to get their message out? Well, to me 'public' means representing we the people. And I don't need to tell y'all how much the lamestream driveby elite media do not represent ordinary Americans. *chuckle*

But aside from all that, I have two simple questions for my opponent. Do you support degrading the institution of marriage by allowing the government to recognize homosexuals as married? And do you support the genocide of millions of innocent babies every year by allowing aborting them?"

gilgigamesh:Alexandra Pelosi did a short film where she interviewed NJ Tea Partiers to see what cuts they would support in their battle to trim the federal government.

Social security? Nope

Medicare? Nope

Military? Nope

Sandy Relief? AW HELLS NAW

Then what? Almost all of them answered "congressional salaries", unspecified 'waste', and that's pretty much it.

So to a Tea Partier, a pie chart of the federal budget would be 99% congressional salaries, waste, and probably NPR, and 1% would be what actually makes up the vast majority of the federal budget.

Long story short: pack it in folks. We're boned.

"Waste" is a lot of things. Welfare. Food stamps. Unemployment. School funding. Supporting NPR, the National Endowment for the Arts (them "Piss Christ" people), PBS, and CPB. I mean, I'm not racist, but you gotta figure them Cadillacs for welfare ghetto queens and illegals and their enormous broods costs millions. MILLIONS.

Sun N Fun will now have to pay the FAA $284,000 in order to keep this control tower functioning during the convention. This is more money that they must raise that will not go to help our children who are struggling in school."

So he hates free market solutions? Sounds like a good Republican plan to me.

Parthenogenetic:Fizpez: Parthenogenetic: Fizpez: You pass a bill that says "You have ZERO flexibility in what you can cut - it must be x% across the board" then biatch and complain that the cuts should come from "somewhere else". The stupid, it burns!

"Thanks to 0bama, Hicksville Regional Airport was closed, costing the local economy over a dozen jobs and millions of dollars in vital civil aviation subsidies. Meanwhile, the 0bama Administration has continued to fund the abortion industry to the tune of eleventy billion dollars. My friends, you elected me to fight exactly this sort of Big Government waste, fraud, and abuse. And while I and my Republican colleagues were unable to stop it last time, I pledge that I will continue to take the fight to the Beltway bandits who did this to you. My opponent, on the other hand, is a tax-and-spend liberal who will only make it worse."

"The sequester was passed by both chambers of Congress, including the Republican led House as a poison pill that would force both parties to negotiate in good faith to avoid what were almost universally understood to be "across the board cuts". In the months leading up to the enacting of the sequester option public media nightly informed us of the unpalatable cuts which would be enacted as part of sequestration. MY opponent is either negligent to the point of "deriliction of duty" by NOT knowing what the sequestration bill meant or counting on you, the public, to be willing to swallow whatever lies he decided to tell once this bill was put into action. The Republican House chose to "call our bluff" on the sequestration bill by not allowing even modest compromises between budget cuts and additional revenue measures - as you can see the bill was no bluff, we are living with those choices."

"My opponent sure has a lot of fancy words. 'Sequestration'. That means taking money away from our community and reducing our local air traffic control safety. 'Additional revenue'. That means raising taxes on ha ...

"Here's the sequestration bill.... here's the vote record on that bill. Sure looks to me like my opponent voted "FOR" exactly what is happening. While he assumes you have no idea what certain words mean I will assume you understand that he voted for this to happen. The reason this happened is that he could not even allow a vote to raise tax rates on those individuals in the top 1% of income in this country. I want to assure you that no one in this entire district is in that category. Just to give you an example of what we are talking about who here earns less than $80,000/year. Wow, look at all those hands. Well my friends you would have to work for 20,000 years to earn as much money as that 1%'ers - that's right, my opponent is defending someone who makes more than every single person in this room... combined. That taxing that person anymore would be a "horrible burden". He doesnt see sequestration as costing YOU money - even though we stand here to day with those facts already in hand - he simply can not imagine his rich friends who are funding his entire campaign paying even a tiny amount more in taxes to avoid these drastic cuts."

/kinda fun - I guess the success of either of us depends on exactly how stupid the constituency is.

Parthenogenetic:Fizpez: Parthenogenetic: Fizpez: You pass a bill that says "You have ZERO flexibility in what you can cut - it must be x% across the board" then biatch and complain that the cuts should come from "somewhere else". The stupid, it burns!

"Thanks to 0bama, Hicksville Regional Airport was closed, costing the local economy over a dozen jobs and millions of dollars in vital civil aviation subsidies. Meanwhile, the 0bama Administration has continued to fund the abortion industry to the tune of eleventy billion dollars. My friends, you elected me to fight exactly this sort of Big Government waste, fraud, and abuse. And while I and my Republican colleagues were unable to stop it last time, I pledge that I will continue to take the fight to the Beltway bandits who did this to you. My opponent, on the other hand, is a tax-and-spend liberal who will only make it worse."

"The sequester was passed by both chambers of Congress, including the Republican led House as a poison pill that would force both parties to negotiate in good faith to avoid what were almost universally understood to be "across the board cuts". In the months leading up to the enacting of the sequester option public media nightly informed us of the unpalatable cuts which would be enacted as part of sequestration. MY opponent is either negligent to the point of "deriliction of duty" by NOT knowing what the sequestration bill meant or counting on you, the public, to be willing to swallow whatever lies he decided to tell once this bill was put into action. The Republican House chose to "call our bluff" on the sequestration bill by not allowing even modest compromises between budget cuts and additional revenue measures - as you can see the bill was no bluff, we are living with those choices."

"My opponent sure has a lot of fancy words. 'Sequestration'. That means taking money away from our community and reducing our local air traffic control safety. 'Additional revenue'. That means raising taxes on ha ...

So they're biatching that those plumdunk air ports that only exist because of Federal tax payer subsidies are closing meaning these good Reps can't take their private jets to them and, as others have pointed out, they might have to fly a COMMERCIAL airliner. THE HORROR.

Dog Welder:Republicans want government to pay for stuff? You might need to raise some more revenue.

The taxes on the wealthy are at the historical lows and our country doesn't have money. Yes, we need to cut spending, but we also need to raise taxes back to practical levels.

Regardless of the "it was Oblahma's idea" spin, the GOP own this mess.

I love the "it was Obama's idea" argument. And to use republicans favorite "small house" analogies. If one of your teenagers goes out drinking with friends or jumps off a bridge, do you then not punish him because "it was John's idea" "John brought the beer" "John said we should all jump off the bridge"? Does blaming John absolve you of the fact you still decided to do it?

Okay, Obama is an idiot for proposing the sequester. You (republicans) are the idiots who voted for it. So who is the true idiot? The idiot who proposed the plan or the ones who did what the "idiot" suggested?

"There is plenty of waste that can be trimmed by administrators implementing the budget sequester and there is absolutely no need to put Columbia workers on unemployment because of the Obama Administration's poor choices on where to cut."WELL, ASSHOLE, you had YEARS to decide where to cut. Instead you went with the COWARD option and let someone else decide where to cut. AND NOW you are biatching because you didnt want to do your job?FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

The Name:They're also really into cutting "foreign aid" (usually with the added "to countries what don't even like us"), which is a whopping one percent of the total federal budget.

I love when they bring that up and yet don't realize that often its some of that foreign aid which helps some nations stop from devolving into warlord chaos which invariably would spill into the region its in creating instability and possibly crush emerging markets and stop commodity trading in regions.

In other words, that small investment helps to keep your stupid iphone as cheap as it is you teatard people.

Hyjamon:Dog Welder: Republicans want government to pay for stuff? You might need to raise some more revenue.

The taxes on the wealthy are at the historical lows and our country doesn't have money. Yes, we need to cut spending, but we also need to raise taxes back to practical levels.

Regardless of the "it was Oblahma's idea" spin, the GOP own this mess.

I love the "it was Obama's idea" argument. And to use republicans favorite "small house" analogies. If one of your teenagers goes out drinking with friends or jumps off a bridge, do you then not punish him because "it was John's idea" "John brought the beer" "John said we should all jump off the bridge"? Does blaming John absolve you of the fact you still decided to do it?

Okay, Obama is an idiot for proposing the sequester. You (republicans) are the idiots who voted for it. So who is the true idiot? The idiot who proposed the plan or the ones who did what the "idiot" suggested?

And let's also point out that the sequester idea was born due to GOP unwillingness to compromise on a debt deal two years ago, gambling that they would be in control of the Senate, House and Presidency by the end of 2012. They failed miserably at two of those things and they held onto the third due to gerrymandering. At the rate they're going, 2014 is going to be another wake-up call for the GOP considering they apparently hit the Snooze Button after the 2012 wake-up call. Farking idiots.

...and ignored all of the ones who said other things, while citing the handful who said what she wanted to hear. That's the beauty of selective editing.

to see what cuts they would support in their battle to trim the federal government.

Social security? NopeMedicare? NopeMilitary? Nope

That's the thing, though...

We don't even need actual cuts for most of those. We just need to slow the increase in growth, and stop spending a whole lot of money on other projects that really, seriously aren't worth the money. We could also cut the spending on things like Social Security and Medicare - without cutting benefits (AKA "hire fewer bureaucrats and pay the rest less money"), and cut military spending by chopping nonessential programs.

On the other hand, I've been to a number of Tea Party rallies, and the overwhelming opinion is that it ALL needs to be cut - yes, including the programs you listed. The problem is that most pollsters and interviewers put the question as "just" defense cuts, instead of "defense cuts as an overall reduction in spending." Even the most rabid defense hawks know there's a lot of waste in the Pentagon budget, and it could easily lose ten percent right off the top.

cirby:Even the most rabid defense hawks know there's a lot of waste in the Pentagon budget, and it could easily lose ten percent right off the top.

I'd be perfectly okay with the Pentagon dictating which things they need and asking Congress to fund those things instead of Congress funding a bunch of things and telling the Pentagon "You will take these things." I believe that would solve a huge chunk of the problem right there.

The scope of warfare has changed dramatically in the past decade, and our military needs to change with it. We have more tanks than we will ever need, and our last generation of aircraft are still better than anything any other country is using. Build less tanks, more drones, prepare more for urban combat and anti-insurgency.

In 18 months the GOP will run on a "we cut the deficit while Obama spent money on X" and they will win their seats becauseA) Most people have incredibly short memories.B) Most people don't ever dig below the surface of a talking pointC) By then they will need maybe 38% of the vote to retain 60% of the House.

This is the only relevant response. The GOP aren't going to take it in the shorts over this one because they are regaining control of the message the same way they always do; lie, obfuscate, and blame Obama until the media runs with it. And they will win the midterms because Americans only hear them blaming Obama, so they associate the failure with Obama because the average American doesn't hear any other name, as stated in A and B.

cameroncrazy1984:Elandriel: he GOP aren't going to take it in the shorts over this one because they are regaining control of the message

I'm sorry, I just don't see that happening.

Yeah, if the Republicans could control the message like that, they wouldn't have lost as big as they did in 2012. Plus some of the Teabaggers wanted the sequester to happen and are proud that it did. It's hard to see how the Republicans can win without their lockstep, and it's obvious that they can't.

Keep in mind that the Republican Party is pushing for Paul Ryan and Scott Walker to lead their party. The Republicans have learned nothing. On the bright side, they're doing their bit to mobilize the Democratic Party and everybody else to vote against them while disenfranchising their own rabid base.

I wish I could believe either of you, but we all trend toward news sources that are slightly more objective than "MSM" as a whole. CNN, these idiotic BuzzFeed/Politico type sites, and of course the ubiquitous NewsCorp. That's where most of the people get their news, and it is dominated by idiotic soundbytes like "Obama's Tax Raises didn't work" "Obama's economy continues to struggle" blah blah. Attaching the name to Obama to default_generic_negative_headline.template then affiliates "Obama bad" in the mind of the low-information voter. Meanwhile, there is no Republican coutnerpart. There isn't a sustained "Rubio bad" because he's not in a position of power, just a position of publicity. There isn't a sustained "Boehner bad" outside of center/left-leaning organizations and publications. Or "McConnell bad". The filibuster abuse still isn't getting press even after the broken "gentleman's deal". The sequester blame has shifted considerably in the GOP's favor. Wedge issues push elections but economic conditions decide them, or more accurately the person/party receiving the most blame for economic conditions. The GOP won 2010 by going economy economy economy. They would have won 2012, but they got distracted by raperaperape and the whole house of cards fell down. So they ended up taking the blame (rightfully so, but public perception seems more important than reality and the GOP has mastered this knowledge) and ended up losing overall. Nominating an actually out of touch rich white elitist didn't help their cause, admittedly.

But yeah. The media is completely uninterested in helping the people do something that would benefit them and the country, because that benefit comes at the expense of immediate enrichment. Long-term planning has gone to hell. Quarterly profits are all that matter until the permafrost melts and we all die anyway.

/adjusts tinfoil, or whatever the "fark everything" equivalent of it is

Dog Welder:and our last generation of aircraft are still better than anything any other country is using.

Just to nitpick, no, they aren't. We're currently only maintaining a lead due to upgrades, better weapons mounted to the planes, improved support(AWACs, refuelers, mission planners and such) and more expert pilots.

We needed the F-22 and F-35 in order to keep the lead, in addition to the whole deal that the average USAF plane is now older than it's pilot. In the case of B-52s, we've had the grandfather, father, and son all fly the same jet, and we're looking at adding the grandson to the mix. It can handle it, but an F-15/16 has a lot more stress on the frame, they're only good for so many flying hours.

Elandriel:But yeah. The media is completely uninterested in helping the people do something that would benefit them and the country, because that benefit comes at the expense of immediate enrichment. Long-term planning has gone to hell. Quarterly profits are all that matter until the permafrost melts and we all die anyway.

I think you just described all modern corporations. No interest in bettering society, or even trying to preserve the planet they profit from. Quarterly earnings and bonuses. That's the only reason to exist.

/Corporations are people, my friend.//Sociopath people///Don't look them in the eye.